Abstract
Using Emma Hart’s Skin Film (UK, 16mm, black-and-white, 11 min, 2005–7), as a point of departure, this essay considers how authorial identity has circumscribed critical readings of film in ways that impose premature form on the instability of the abstract image. Skin Film’s abstraction invites us to consider how the human body, the gendered and racialized body in particular, has been made to signify as an already-known epistemological endpoint within our culture. The essay challenges the critical conjoinment of cinematic materiality, authorship, and embodiment that too often provides easy meaning to a perplexingly formless image. The essay argues that instead of rushing to assign meaning to either image or body, we should consider the skin’s dual status as both materially specific and as an unfixed text, both formed and formless, discursively overdetermined yet uncertain in its meaning. The essay puts Skin Film into dialogue with the discourses of feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory, all fields invested in the positioning of vulnerable bodies that have been seen as both materially irreducible and dangerously unstable. Rather, the critical act of refusing to rush to meaning, and instead dwelling on the form of what might be construed as formless, constitutes a political act that embraces difficulty, multiplicity, and uncertainty.
To make Skin Film (UK, 16mm, black-and-white, 11 min, 2005–7), Emma Hart used “sellotape,” or cellophane tape, to produce a map of her nude body from head to toe, picking up hairs, body oils, and skin cells. The 16mm film shows the triangular, branching, rhizomatic structures of the cells that make up the surface of Hart’s skin, magnified and moving across the screen in various shades of gray and white, changing in texture depending on where the tape had been affixed to Hart’s body: the forehead, the neck, the upper arm, the calf, the bottom of the foot. “By sticking sellotape to my skin and then peeling it off, I took off the top surface of my skin,” Hart writes. “I then stuck the tape and the skin to clear 16mm film. It is my actual skin that goes through the projector. It is a film of my total surface area, from head to toe.”1 These two, somewhat contradictory, ideas—Skin Film’s image as both part of her and no more than surface area—come together here. Because it is uniquely generated from Hart’s body at a particular moment, critics usually read Skin Film as indexing the body of its maker. However, I read the film as neither personal nor autobiographical. Skin Film’s image hovers between form and formlessness, both gesturing toward the solidity of Hart’s three-dimensional body as referent and disarticulating that body into extended, durational form: the narrow two-dimensional plane of the filmstrip and the extended time of its projection. Skin, like film, is something we think we know. Yet when skin, like the image, is not readily legible, it poses a problem of signification, a problem of value and order that requires familiar form so as to be recognized. “Each thing” is “required” to “have its form,” as Georges Bataille writes, to be acknowledged and accorded rights within the larger culture.2 For me, Skin Film’s abstraction, flattening, and magnification of the artist’s skin intersects with current thinking about not only the legibility of images but also the legibility of bodies at a time of seemingly infinite dispersal.
Using Skin Film as a point of departure, this essay considers how authorial identity has circumscribed critical readings of film in ways that impose premature form on the instability of the abstract image. Skin Film’s abstraction invites us to consider how the human body, the gendered and racialized body in particular, has been made to signify as an already-known epistemological endpoint within our culture. In doing so, I challenge the critical conjoinment of cinematic materiality, authorship, and embodiment that too often provides easy meaning to a perplexingly formless image. In this equation the value of the indeterminate abstract image, much like that of the human body, is guaranteed by the self-sure anchor of social abstraction: the stereotype. I argue that instead of rushing to assign meaning to either image or body, we should consider the skin’s dual status as both materially specific and as an unfixed text, both formed and formless, discursively overdetermined and yet uncertain in its meaning. Here I put Skin Film into dialogue with the discourses of feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory, all fields invested in the positioning of vulnerable bodies that have been seen as both materially irreducible and dangerously unstable. For human beings, unstable form is associated with an insecure claim to political rights, a problem that cannot be solved easily by securing formal status for the formless. Rather, the critical act of refusing to rush to meaning, and instead dwell on the form of what might be construed as formless, constitutes a political act that embraces difficulty, multiplicity, and uncertainty.
In experimental film criticism of the last two decades, authorial intention and embodied practice have constituted privileged lenses through which to gain interpretative purchase on what may seem like abstract and disjunctive images. This is especially true in relation to the rise of a body of abstract but emphatically material experimental films like Skin Film known as “direct animation,” which extend from the tradition of 1960s and 1970s structural film, a loose grouping of work that eschewed the representational image in favor of explorations of film’s material support.3 Since the mid-1990s experimental forms of direct animation have focused on the connection between the filmmaker’s body, the material world, and the body of the filmstrip.4 While the figure of the author has long been destabilized within the humanities and social sciences, authorship and investigations of cinematic materiality have remained remarkably stable points of reference within experimental film discourse. Direct animators often describe analog film as a physical medium whose “skin” can take the imprint of spit, blood, oils, tears, sweat, water, dirt, plants, radiation—and human skin—suggesting a desire for the direct transfer of authorial touch and physical matter in a way that has been lost in digital forms of image making, proliferation, and circulation. Many of these physical elements tend to be formless, in that in their detachment from the human body or material world they take on the uncertain, mobile form of fluid or the infinitude of microscopic particles. Placing these elements on the surface of film both solidifies them and puts them into motion, gives them form and discomposes them. If at one end of the spectrum of abstraction lie readily identifiable forms like contained geometric lines, squares, circles, and colors, at the other end lie these entities—spreading, oozing, and formless—contained only by the space of the frame. Experimental film critics often read this kind of abstract image as producing a more diffuse, haptic sense of vision, in which the gaze mimics the sense of touch, a mode of knowing appropriate to encountering formlessness that connotes a relationship of duration, physical closeness, and intimacy. Despite this emphasis on the eye’s searching caress, in practice spectatorial knowledge of the artist’s presence and process provides a shortcut to meaning, bestowing the image with both immediately identifiable form and secure access to its referent. The idea that the skin of the artist’s hand has touched the skin of the analog filmstrip has become a crucial point of reference in critical readings of abstract, handmade experimental works like Skin Film, anchoring their abstraction in the filmmaker’s embodied touch as a ground of meaning.5 Yet it is this metaphorical coming together of skins, filmic and authorial, that I wish to uncouple.
Skin Film can help us think about how skin has operated as an epistemological referent that implicitly circumscribes what we can know about a person and, by extension, what can be known about a film—not only experimental film but any film. The wager I make in unhooking embodied authorship from the interpretation of films like these will seem like a radical proposition within the world of experimental film, for which the deciphering of abstract form has been a central preoccupation. Writing on video art, Gabrielle Jennings claims that it can be difficult to define abstraction, “and yet we know it when we see it—sometimes geometric, other times symmetrical, and again, fluid.” Abstraction, she writes, “appears from out of nowhere, as if from a dream, formless and evasive, surprising and obscure.”6 The apparent “nowhere” of aesthetic abstraction poses a problem of reference, which constitutes a distinct epistemological dilemma in a historical period in which most of the images we encounter have been abstracted from their point of origin. In an effort to name and locate the abstract image, experimental film criticism employs the tools of high modernism, with its emphasis on the bounded object and artistic process. Perhaps the stakes of uncoupling abstraction from modernist conceptions of authorship become clearer when we consider work by artists who claim identities culturally deemed as other, whose race, gender, and/or sexuality too easily supply the abstract image with sociological meaning. I believe that dislodging the filmmaker’s body from abstract forms of direct animation can invite critics of film and art to move into other, perhaps unexpected, discursive waters, such as those of feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory mentioned above. How, I ask, can critics engage with the uncertainties that arise in our engagements with abstract forms of representation without resorting to overdetermined stereotypes? What happens if, instead of rushing to assign meaning, we allow abstract texts to function as formless spaces in which we might dwell, spaces that invite imaginative engagement with yet unknown partners?
Skin as a Site of Discursive Transit
For a spectator, Skin Film’s enormous projected image can be mesmerizing and engulfing, resulting in spectatorial fascination and immersion—or disorientation and boredom. In viewing Skin Film’s magnified patterns of skin, the spectator never quite knows where they are in relation to the body. As Kim Knowles writes regarding artist Liz Smith’s use of bodily fluids in her films, “Enlarged on the screen, they resemble scientific microscopic images that bring us into an uncanny physical proximity with the artist’s body.”7 Similarly in Skin Film, once disarticulated from bodily markers, these magnified patterns of skin seem as if they could belong to any human being. Their enlargement on-screen and physical detachment from Hart’s body estranges these inscriptions, making them read much like scientific diagrams from a medical book. In my experience Skin Film’s effect produces less the feeling of engulfing visual immediacy than a sense of the dislocation from the body that is writing’s necessary characteristic.8 Skin Film makes me conscious of my own spectatorial experience of watching. In viewing Skin Film, I do not experience the “haptic visuality” of physical closeness to and sensorial immersion in the textural and affective qualities of the image, but rather the distanciation of watching as a form of reading.9 In this way Skin Film separates the image of the skin from its point of origin, much like cutting off written language from its point of bodily utterance.
The skin is more often thought of as a surface that passively bears the evidence of writing, whether the physical marking of scars, the metaphorical writing of memory, or the stain of discourse. By contrast, in Skin Film the skin functions as an active mark-making instrument rather than merely a medium of recording. Reading Skin Film in relation to the body as an unstable marking implement operates in tension with the essentialist conservatism inherent in the idea of the body as a solid, unchanging ground of identity and meaning. In many readings of abstract experimental films, the author’s body, biography, practice, intentions, and sociological and historical background are called on to give concrete meaning to an abstract and unstable object. As critics, we need to ask how the assumptions we make about the skin of the author, who tends to be seen as an unproblematic conjoinment of body and self, affects our interpretation of cinematic texts. Too often in film criticism the author’s skin functions as a membrane that contains meaning, a magical enclosure that points inward to individual intentions and outward to sociological commonplaces. In this realm, authorial skin tends not only to reference physical matter but also to delineate an interpretative space of transit to already known truisms about race, class, and gender. In Skin Film, by contrast, the image of skin functions as a free-floating, unanchored sign whose meaning and origins remain unstable.
I am thinking about skin as a text that references both the physical matter of specific bodies and functions as the discursive product of cultural hierarchies of knowledge. This is important for considering what affordances and limitations come with the conceptual disarticulation of not only a film from its maker but of skin from a specifically raced, gendered, and sexually desiring authorial body. Historically, skin as surface serves as an epistemological shorthand that has been used to make certain human bodies into abstractions that render them immediately knowable. As such, skin as both matter and metaphor has constituted an important site of contention, disruption, and possibility both within theoretical discourse and in the realm of the social. I turn to a question Donna Haraway asked in her 1991 “Cyborg Manifesto” at the height of identity politics, a question that asks us to think about skin as more than just a container for the human body, and with it, the self we assume it to house. “Why,” Haraway asks, “should our bodies end at the skin?”10 For Haraway, this question was meant to provoke its reader to contemplate how human bodies extend toward and intertwine with technologies and other forms of nonhuman life to disrupt the limiting essentialism of 1980s and early 1990s race and gender politics. If bodies do not end at the skin, then we are neither complete nor contained nor easy to label but possess endless possibility for change. Haraway’s cyborg body comprises “both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.”11 In this space of imagination, future material realities have not yet been determined.
In 2001 Haraway’s question, “Why should our bodies end at the skin?,” was taken up and reconfigured by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey in their edited collection, Thinking Through the Skin. What would it mean, Ahmed and Stacey wondered, if instead of asking why bodies must end at their skins, we ask what it would mean “to suggest that skins do not necessarily end at their bodies”?12 In some ways this is not so different from the question Haraway asked a decade earlier. Ahmed and Stacey’s shift in emphasis, however, highlights the dual nature of the skin as both matter and as metaphor, in the sense that it is a vehicle that travels between two ideas that together produce something for which there are no words. For Ahmed and Stacey, the skin operates as both physical “matter” and as “metaphor” in that it functions “as a site of exposure or connectedness” to other bodies, objects, discourses, technologies, and structures of power that shape one another in turn (I, 2). While they assert that skin is an “effect” that depends on hierarchies of inscription “that produce the skin as marked” and therefore makes human beings capable of interpretation, categorization, and governance, I would add that skin also operates as a site of connectedness to the supportive forces of community, kinship, and affinity (I, 15). In what follows I want to propose a potentially productive misreading of Ahmed and Stacey’s proposal that “as a site of exposure or connectedness,” “skins do not necessarily end at their bodies” (I, 2, 15).
For me, Ahmed and Stacey’s phrasing suggests that through representation, literal skins become texts and therefore sites of exposure that generate connectedness to other discursive spheres. As text the representation of skin quite literally becomes a surface for conceptual transit to other realms of interpretation rather than a container for a unified body and self whose meaning is already known. In Ahmed and Stacey’s proposition that “skins do not necessarily end at their bodies” (I, 15), we can see the representation of skin in Skin Film as offering a site of critical transit once detached from the embodied identity of a specific artist and a specific set of significations. To read abstract works like Skin Film solely in terms that fix their meaning in authorial bodies and intentions robs us of the possibility of transformation, which can occur when indeterminate texts rub up against adjacent discourses in productive ways. I argue that the idea that skins do not necessarily end at their bodies helps detach film form from the enclosure of authorship, a move that invites a broader reading practice that extends into a contemporary context in which bodies and their representation are complicated by changing cultural discourses of gender, sexuality, and racial difference. This allows the image of skin in Skin Film to function as a metaphorical site of transit to other discursive realms rather than a membrane of critical containment.
Disarticulating Gender
I want to return to Hart’s authorial body for a moment to think about the critical function the female body performs in fixing meaning to an abstract text like Skin Film. Even though we know that gender is not a stable thing, when the artist is a young, white, straight-appearing cis woman, it’s difficult not to consider her gender as a point of interpretation. This is especially true when the work appears to take on questions of gendered visibility. Experimental film screenings tend to center the filmmaker as a creative font of meaning. A spectator viewing Skin Film in an experimental shorts screening would be given a program that includes the titles of films accompanied by artist statements. In these intimate screenings, filmmakers often carry their fragile, handmade films from site to site, making it possible that Hart would be in attendance. Hart’s authorship would be explicitly attached to the film through her physical presence, her program note, and/or her performance in the Q&A periods that usually follow such screenings. A quick internet search brings up a picture of Hart’s face, that of a young, red-haired white woman, sexuality unknown, who lists her home as Great Britain. Many would read Skin Film, which references the artist’s own naked, female-presenting body, in relation to her gender, though not her race. Made between 2005 and 2007, Skin Film first appeared in a historical period marked by increasing public discourse on how a wide range of bodies occupies public space. Yet the knowledge that Skin Film was made through close contact with the nude body of a young woman would have made it resonate with the pornographic skin flick and discourses of gendered representation.
For many in the experimental film community, the skin flick would conjure associations with other handmade experimental films, like Naomi Uman’s better-known Removed (US, 16mm, color, sound, 7 min, 1999), in which the artist used nail polish and bleach to erase female figures from the emulsive surface of a German pornographic film from the 1970s, leaving the projector’s light to penetrate the raw, transparent skin of the film.13 Projected light transforms this space of erasure, once occupied by the representational form of a naked woman, into a bright, luminous, writhing blob, whose post-dubbed dialog and moans still sound on the audio track. The most common reading of Removed is that the film offers an “ironic feminist critique” of the porn industry’s emphasis on “heteronormative masculine visual pleasure in order to rethink the representation of women in film,” as Greg Zinman puts it.14 Similarly, Kim Knowles writes: “With the rest of the image left intact, this diegetic erasure reveals, through absence, the power structures inherent in the act of looking.”15 By contrast, Justin Remes rebuts this reading, saying that Uman was never interested in making an antipornography film. Remes focuses instead on what he sees as the film’s “peekaboo” erotics. I am most interested in a single line from Remes’s correspondence with Uman. In response to the question about whether she had set out to make a political statement against pornography, Uman writes: “I don’t really think in those ways. I’m interested in cinema.”16 This comment suggests that rather than reading Removed’s abstraction only in terms of gender, we should also turn our gaze to the genderless, sensuous materials of cinema that shine through the crude surface of the porn film. In my own viewing, Uman’s removal of the female form produces a glowing formless space that pulses and shifts within its dated pornographic mise-en-scène and absurd dubbed soundtrack, exposed as a ridiculous discursive container for female sexuality. Here the intersecting materialities of naked celluloid and projected light operate as the site of the film’s eroticism, an eroticism that has no defined object. The erasure of Removed’s female figures can be said to produce what Ofer Eliaz describes as “a new eroticism of ruptured and collaged bodies.”17 For me, these glowing, pulsating formless forms function less as ruptured bodies than as a revelation of a charged, erotic potential, whose meaning cannot be fixed by the gendered representational frame of commodified, sexualized womanhood.
While Removed retains the diegetic space of the German porn film on which it draws, Skin Film depicts no diegetic space beyond its image of skin, and thus no social or historical context of any kind. Extending to encompass the space of the frame, Skin Film uncouples its image from worldly markers of womanhood, traditional cinematic looking relations, and capitalist structures of exchange. Under these conditions, it’s not surprising that Skin Film’s viewer might grasp at outside supports like the artist’s gendered body in their attempts to make meaning of Skin Film’s abstracted image. But we also can read Skin Film’s separation of its image from social context as disarticulating it from either claimed identities or the historical specificity of Hart’s gendered being. While Skin Film could be said to present its viewer with an abstracted female nude, the film’s magnification and lack of explicit differentiation sever it from a recognizably female form, and by extension, from the gendered specificity of culture. For me, Skin Film’s translation of the shape of a three-dimensional female body to a filmstrip with the capacity for projection eliminates not only recognizable signs of traditional womanhood but also any hint of titillation. Rather than being inflected by external markers of gendered embodiment, Skin Film emphasizes the instability of the physical body in relation to self, and by extension the instability of all of bodies to all selves.
Skin Film’s strategies of disarticulation encourage us to consider how the culturally readable surface of one’s body can be misaligned with one’s sense of self. Here abstraction from cultural and cinematic structures of gender, race, and sexuality invites consideration of the skin as a site for the projection of both personal and cultural expectations. As Jay Prosser writes, the skin operates as a “phantasmatic surface,” both a site of the subject’s projection of their own psychic reality and a projection of the dominant culture’s ideas about what constitutes gendered legibility.18 In 1998 Prosser described transgender sex reassignment as the subject’s attempt to literally “remember through skin a sexed body that should have been,” so that the inner and outer selves come together in a way that makes that body signify in terms more closely tied to the subject’s own sense of self.19 More recently, queer and trans theorists have complicated these claims, emphasizing the importance of the incommensurability of many different kinds of bodies with societal expectations.20 At the same time, we know that the general culture “continue[s] to invest the legibility of identity in the skin” in ways that uphold social fictions.21 To be clear, I imagine Skin Film not as a film that takes up transgender issues, nor as an intended meditation on skin as a racialized surface, as I explore in what follows. Rather, Skin Film’s image of the skin as an abstracted surface projected within the boundaries of a physical screen might remind us that whether in abstracted form or attached to one’s body, the skin always operates as a screen onto which both personal and cultural fantasies are projected. The skin always presents an image to be read. In short, both despite and because of its abstracted form, Skin Film invites the critic on a potentially open-ended journey into contiguous discursive realms. It asks us to consider how our own projected cultural fantasies about skin, whether the physical matter of skin or its representation, impact our critical readings of representations and human bodies alike.
Disarticulating Race and Sexuality
In its formal abstraction, Skin Film’s image upends standard ideas about authorial embodiment as critical endpoint. While most critics would fix on Hart’s gendered authorship, her whiteness would likely go unremarked upon within experimental film criticism. What effect does this critical absence have but to produce whiteness as a universal ground of being for authorship? Many scholars have written about how the critical failure to consider whiteness turns that whiteness into a universal ground of expectation. Much like the world of film, too often online culture—indeed all culture—is assumed to be white unless otherwise stated. This allows whiteness to function as what André Brock calls a mode of “interpretive flexibility” in the sense that it can reference both a specific individual body and a universal humanity from which racial difference is excluded.22 In Skin Film, Hart’s formal disarticulation of her epidermis from a body into changing grids of skin cells produces a representation that is at once tied to her body and dislodged from it, allowing it to reference both the skin of a specific young white woman and skin as a form universal to humanity—and thus for the author’s whiteness to go unremarked upon. To be explicit, I am not critiquing Hart, her whiteness, or her style of authorship. Rather, I am critical of how works by white artists are generally taken up within film discourse—as detached from discourses of race, as if racial embodiment and the aesthetic choices that attend representation are inconsequential.
Whiteness as the implicit ground of meaning has been assumed even in attempts to rethink the hierarchies of form in high modernist art. Writing in the mid 1990s, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss focused on operations that declassified modernism’s ordering structures regarding the work of art via categories meant to counter high modernism’s emphasis on verticality, forward directionality, contained presence, and abstraction—namely, through attention to the seemingly formless aspects they associated with categories like horizontality, pulse, entropy, and base materialism. Bois and Krauss based their critique on Bataille’s writing on formlessness, describing the formless not as a thingly quality but as an “operation” that “brings things down in the world,” in the sense that the formless performs the “declassification” of the taxonomic order of modernism.23 While we can read the cultural implications of their formal declassification of modernist hierarchies, I see Bois and Krauss as focusing too narrowly on modernist art as a realm separate from the aesthetic organization of the social world.24 Even in their deformation of the field of modernism, Bois and Krauss implicitly imagine both artist and viewer as white heteronormative subjects whose self-containment mirrors that of the modernist art object’s autonomous “bounded whole[ness].”25 While they employ the formless to investigate the modernist artwork’s suppressed disorder, I suggest that the human subject they imagine remains a figure of “ideal unity” from which “all apparent disorder is necessarily reabsorbed.”26 In other words, despite the goal of unraveling modernist tenets of value by reading artworks through the lens of formlessness, disorder, and uncertainty, Bois and Krauss’s project ultimately maintains the author as the bounded universal subject associated with white heteronormativity.
Experimental film criticism draws heavily on the tradition of high modernism and its critical anchors of formal analysis, material support, and authorial centering. For me, this raises questions about the spaces of art and criticism. I follow Sara Ahmed here, asking, “If whiteness gains currency by being unnoticed, then what does it mean to notice whiteness?”27 For Ahmed, whiteness is not just epidermal, not just confined to the body, but operates as an assumption that organizes how the space of everyday life is made to accommodate—literally, to make comfortable—some bodies over others. To notice whiteness in Skin Film within the world of experimental film would be to challenge whiteness as the implicit ground of authorial being and with it the overlapping spaces of art and everyday life where some bodies are made more comfortable than others. More generally, to notice whiteness in abstract experimental works like Skin Film would open thinking about the material and imaginative structures that continue to privilege white male authorship. It goes without saying that if unhyphenated authorship still carries implicit connotations of whiteness, then only forms of authorship marked as Black, Latinx, or Asian will signify as requiring critical examination in terms of race.
A historical understanding of the ways that skin has functioned as a crucial site of interpretation makes the skin, both as matter and in representation, a charged site. Here I want to take an imaginative leap regarding Skin Film. The act of translating the epidermal surface of the human body into a depersonalized image, as Skin Film does, changes in ethical gravity if we imagine the skin it references as Black. However, to move from the formal abstraction of skin in Skin Film to the abstraction of skin marked as Black leads us to consider the deforming social and bodily abstractions deployed by the Atlantic slave trade. For many viewers, this shift in authorial race would evoke the depersonalization of Black people via slavery, which transformed the bounded individual body—a category of legal personhood—into a detachable commodity that, once abstracted from identity, family, and place, could be circulated within the loop of racial capitalism.28
Imagined as the skin of a Black artist, Skin Film points explicitly to what Hortense J. Spillers describes as abstracted, unprotected flesh, an image that would haunt Skin Film’s representation of skin as “divided” or “ripped,” rather than willingly detached by the artist. In her foundational “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers employs the term body as a material point of discursive convergence, a subject position sheltered by legal rights. The historical transformation from the form of the legally protected body to a state of formless, vulnerable “flesh” is the result of what Spillers articulates as a “subject-obliterating, thing-making project,” both “a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile,” and a violent “severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire,” its gendered difference, and its very subjectivity.29 For Spillers, captive flesh is formless matter that has been abstracted from the protections of legal personhood to be made into a fleshly commodity. This brutal abstraction of a person’s human qualities—from body into unprotected flesh—is fundamentally different from Hart’s self-imposed gesture of depersonalization in Skin Film. Hart willingly transforms her body into physical surface area and cinematic time to rid her authorship of interiority. She abstracts body from representation as a performative gesture under the guise of play.30 Yet to abstract the self in this way from both interiority and history, to return to Prosser, is a mode far more available to those artists for whom skin “is not a site for social memory and consciousness.”31
Imagining the skin in Skin Film as belonging to a Black artist points to the problem with which I began this essay. Too often the physical embodiment of gendered, racialized, and queer artists has operated as a critical terminus that provides seemingly straightforward meaning by repeating stereotypical, already known forms.32 In their 2019 manifesto on Black film, Raquel Gates and Michael Gillespie consider what makes a film “black.”33 As many scholars have argued, critics of all stripes regularly tie the “black” of Black film explicitly to racialized authorship and the embodied experience of Black life.34 For Gates and Gillespie, experimental film’s emphasis on form explicitly invites consideration of a film’s formal elements in constructing what Gillespie has called “film blackness.”35 Rather than operating as a “biological determinant,” Gates and Gillespie write, the “black” of Black film must be taken as a “formal proposition.”36 Similarly, in 2017, queer scholars of color Kadji Amin, Amber Musser, and Roy Pérez argued that attention to “aesthetic form offers resources of resistance to the violences of interpretation that prematurely fix the meaning of minority artistic production within prefabricated narratives.”37 This call for attention to formal analysis as a mode of “resistance” in the name of retaining the critical possibility of the formless, as yet undetermined, nature of interpretation should be a reminder for those writing not just about so-called Black or queer film but about any work of art. Nor does turning to form mean that we should sever all interpretative ties to authorial embodiment and historical context. Rather, attention to form should begin a yet undetermined process of revelation.
What does it mean to take up Blackness as a formal proposition? To take up race, gender, or sexual orientation as formal proposition might seem to imply that we focus on the realm of the aesthetic and abandon the realm of lived experience. But I do not think that is what these writers suggest. Rather, I offer that to take up form in a serious way implies reading without guarantee, refusing any kind of easy one-to-one correspondence between aesthetic form and already fashioned notions. It means that, rather than settling for the denotation of easy meaning to which critics so often turn when confronted by abstraction, one must take up aesthetic uncertainty, with its possibility for the proliferation of signification and the capacity for transformation that such excess generates.
Eugenie Brinkema has described her method of “radical formalism” as similarly involving “reading without guarantee” in that “its terms, affordances, and stakes cannot be declared and secured beforehand.”38 I agree with Brinkema in principle, but I see her approach to form as producing a radical containment of the object that separates formal considerations from the social world of politics. This desire for critical enclosure is epitomized in Brinkema’s modification of the quotation from Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious with which she opens Life-Destroying Diagrams. There Brinkema strikes through the term political twice, along with the terms historical and social, leaving only the formal as her “ground” of interpretation.39
In my understanding of how we can use formalism in ways that do not default to the unacknowledged “contracts that purport to stabilize and restrain signification,” I draw on the work of scholars who have performed crucial critiques of modernist discourse that point to its exclusion of othered bodies, particularly those who are Black and female.40 For example, Rizvana Bradley examines how the body of the Black woman has not only been foundational to modernism but has also posed a threat to the inherent disorder of the modernist aesthetic’s impression of bounded coherence. For Bradley, questions of the aesthetic go beyond modernism’s investment in contained form, extending to the aesthetic organization of the very world as a coherent, ordered whole, and with it the idea of a universal bounded subject.41 Rather than separating the aesthetic from the social, she and Denise Ferreira da Silva argue for methods of critique that invite the potentially world-ending chaos of the “indeterminable of contemplation.”42 This is what Ferreira da Silva calls a Black feminist “poethical” approach to critiquing art, which instead of ascribing “a formal purposiveness to the object . . . stresses the provisional ground where questions of form, formlessness, and abstraction collide.”43 Ironically, in taking up Blackness or queerness as an open-ended formal proposition, one must embrace not only the uncertainty of aesthetics but also the instability of the social and historical frameworks through which life, bodies, and skin have been ordered. I suggest that formalist methods do not ask us to turn away from politics. Rather, formalist attention to abstract works like Skin Film can open space to imagine a world that has not yet solidified in form. For me, this suggests that even as bodies are irreducible in their materiality, the malleable frame of discourse can offer a space of transformation.
Skin across Discourse
Discourse is a site of both transformation and contestation. Skin Film’s abstraction of its image from the body and interiority of its author does not erase consideration of embodied historical and social contexts but rather invites us to consider the often uncomfortable coming together of discourses that seek to account for those experiences. How skin signifies in different discursive traditions often exposes uncomfortable incommensurabilities. Let’s look, for example, at an imaginary meeting between queer theory, critical race studies, and literary theory in Keguro Macharia’s deployment of the metaphor of “frottage.”44 Frottage quite literally references the rubbing together of skins for sexual gratification, but Macharia uses frottage as a vehicle to explore how discourses of sexuality and race often rub up against each other in literary discourse. There frottage can be not only pleasurable but sometimes irritating and painful. Macharia’s understanding of the relationship between the self and skin draws explicitly on Spillers’s theorization of the “subject-obliterating, thing-making project” of slavery, referenced above. To this conversation, I invite Leo Bersani’s “Sociability and Cruising,” a text that privileges the anonymous coming together of skins as the inadvertent domain of white men.
Macharia and Bersani take up the depersonalization of skin in ways that echo Skin Film’s detachment of surface from self. For Macharia, the idea of frottage as a fraught site of encounter comes from the opening passage of Alex Haley’s Roots, in which Kunta Kinte is chained closely to the bodies of other bound men, whose skins rub together with the slightest movement of the ship, jostling their chains and their limbs. In this form of impersonal and potentially unwanted frottage between bodies made mere flesh, Macharia writes: “skin, self, body is worn away through ‘grinding’ and ‘grating,’ as bodies are fed into slavery’s maw.”45 This is undoubtedly painful, yet it also constitutes a shared experience that generates kinship among its survivors. Macharia writes that for some of those men this contact with other male bodies also might have produced unexpected and complicated pleasures. In contrast with the painful and ambivalent aspects of the impersonal, unintentional frottage that Macharia describes on the slave ship, Bersani finds only pleasure and freedom in the impersonal coming together of skins via cruising, which he sees as generating a radical form of depersonalized sociability. While Macharia does not specifically reference Bersani, Bersani’s thinking about cruising as an impersonal form of social relation provides a striking contrast. For Bersani, cruising’s revolutionary potential lies in its “nameless, identity-free contact,” a coming together of skins in which we leave ourselves behind, an option that, as Jose Muñoz subsequently argues in Cruising Utopia, is always more available to white men.46
Skin Film’s impersonal, disarticulated images of skin resonates with Bersani’s considerations of cruising as well as later queer challenges by Muñoz and Macharia. For me, critical discomfort attends the meeting of these discourses, both of which describe frottage as an impersonal encounter. In each the impersonal allows a supposed leveling of individuals into indifferent bodies that can generate kinship and community within nondominant groups—albeit under very different historical circumstances. Macharia and Bersani’s descriptions of the material coming together of bodies whose skins have been abstracted from the personal are not equivalent. Here the meeting of queer theory and critical Black theory dramatizes this incommensurability, a refusal of equation between skins, bodies, and flesh. However, it is only by courting the specificities that attend this discursive mismatch that we can engage the productive disorder of their uncomfortable remainders.
Conclusion
In the historical moment in which I write, in which taken-for-granted assumptions about the racial, gendered, and desiring status of human bodies are being challenged and dismantled, we should ask how this changing context impacts us as critics. What does it mean to interpret films that represent the human body and its experiences in an era in which the status of embodiment is less a ground of meaning than a space of contestation? On a concrete level this contest over embodiment can be seen in debates over the social monitoring of normative gender performance and sexuality, as well as the surveillance of racialized peoples in public space. These questions of how we interpret the surfaces of human bodies affect the ways in which we, as critics, think about how we ascribe meaning to surfaces that present themselves as abstract, illegible, formless. But perhaps, when severed from authorship as a membrane of critical containment, abstraction can offer film criticism a site of transit to other discursive realms, to other critical possibilities, to other sites of contact. I do not suggest that we abandon considerations of authorship altogether. Nor do I suggest that abstraction functions as an open container that can be filled by any interpretation whatsoever. Rather, in asking how we approach forms that we think of as being without recognizable shape, we should remember that abstract images can be filled too easily with stereotypical sociological interpretations. Here I have attempted to dwell critically in an abstract work’s particular poetics of formless form as a mode that opens, proliferates, expands, and undoes meaning rather than securing it.
Of course, Skin Film does not eliminate form altogether but rather transcodes it to another medium. Skin Film translates the idea of skin from its expected shape, the body of a young woman, to another shape, that of film. In translating the spatial expanse of her skin, as recorded via its cells, oils, and hairs, into the two-dimensional form of a filmstrip and a duration of eleven minutes when run through a projector, Hart explicitly strains the idea of meaningful translation. “I have made a film of how much space I take up and this takes eleven minutes to watch,” Hart says, emphasizing her body as a solid volume that has been converted to a different configuration of space and time.47 In some ways this implies a monstrous transformation, from form to formlessness. Yet I would remind us that not only film but nearly all representation today undergoes some form of translation. Representation translates bodies from one medium to another, from material substances to inscriptions. In doing so, representation makes explicit that bodies are formed and deformed through discourse, that thing that both holds us in place and yet remains ever malleable and uncertain.
This brings me back to the “Cyborg Manifesto” and Haraway’s question, “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”48 Haraway ends her manifesto with the metaphor of the salamander in her consideration of what it would mean to disregard already known critical tools. Attempting to rethink her understanding of complexly raced, gendered, and technologized bodies, Haraway metaphorically transports her reader from the realm of criticism to biology. The salamander, she writes, can regrow an injured limb, but in doing so can end up developing what seems like a “monstrous” appendage.49 With this metaphor Haraway suggests that when we break apart essentialist notions of race, gender, and technology, our understanding is forced to grow in a multitude of surprising, as yet undetermined, potentially monstrous, ways. In thinking specifically about how we approach abstraction as a site of transformation, Haraway’s metaphor of monstrous regrowth suggests that the severing of tightly fashioned critical bindings can be productively unpredictable. But such changes always are accompanied by the pain of growth.
Notes
Hart, Emma Hart. The quotation also appears in Knowles, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears,” 456. In referencing Hart’s statements, I take seriously what I see as her own conflicting desires to at once mark her authorial intention and decenter her embodied authorship. I do not mean to reference Hart as a font of meaning, but I read her statements as exposing the complex weave of intention, inevitability, and ambivalence that characterizes many artists’ statements.
Bataille also asserts that formlessness is a particularly academic problem that ultimately suggests an intolerance of ambiguity. Indeed, “for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape” (“Formless,” 31). Within experimental film criticism we can see both a love of abstraction and an intolerance of it that results in the critic’s desire to ascribe meaning—to give form—to the nonrepresentational image. In the discourse of modernist art in the 1940s and 1950s, often exemplified by the criticism of Clement Greenberg (see “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”), the turn to aesthetic abstraction accompanied a movement away from, an abstraction from, the messy social world of capital. Within that contained world of avant-garde experimentation, critics linked painterly abstraction to the specificity of its concrete referents, namely the material supports that made up the medium: canvas, frame, paint, and so on. In the 1960s and 1970s many artists explored what came to be known as structural film. In a period in which representation was seen as extremely problematic (e.g., Peter Gidal’s famous statement that women could not be represented on film), experimental filmmakers produced abstract works that investigated aspects of the frame, the screen, projected light, sequential movement, the filmic material’s capacity for cutting, taking color, scratching, and the like. While such films could include recognizable representational images, their form was often so complex that it was difficult to immediately comprehend. At the same time interpreters of this kind of abstract film largely turned away from sociological explanations and instead relied on a combination of phenomenological experience, formalist analysis, and filmmakers’ personal accounts of their intention and process. In other words, even as authorship was critically destabilized by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, it remained a crucial explanatory tool. See Barthes, “Death of the Author”; and Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
In moving out of the enclosure of authorship, I want to consider how Skin Film operates in the experimental film tradition of autobiography marked by filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Jon Jost, Jonas Mekas, Anne Charlotte Robertson, and Carolee Schneemann. Skin Film is unlike much experimental film in that it does not point to the artist’s depth of lived experience, their singular perception, or their feeling. Skin Film does not, like most autobiographical experimental film, include representational images of the filmmaker’s face and body, nor does it present their voice or words. Neither does Skin Film feature the eye/I of the filmmaker’s vision as recorded in the film’s image, producing the world as a metaphorical reflection of the self, to paraphrase P. Adams Sitney. Autobiography within the American experimental filmmaking tradition tends toward fragmented, contradictory, metaphorical presentations of selfhood rather than toward a whole, all-knowing subject. At the same time, scholarship on these films by these experimental filmmakers tends to emphasize artistic genius, unique sensibility, and intention, however contingent, arbitrary, or unconscious, in a way that unifies the artist into a singular authorial font.
See Knowles, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears”; Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices; Zinman, Making Images Move; Takahashi, “Writing the World”; Takahashi, “‘Meticulously, Recklessly, Worked Upon’”; Smith and Hamlyn, Experimental and Expanded Animation; and Ruddell and Ward, Crafty Animator.
Marks, Skin of the Film. For a different consideration of the hapticity of images, see Campt, Listening to Images; and Campt, Black Gaze.
Ahmed and Stacey, “Introduction,” 15 (hereafter cited as I).
Thanks to Justin Remes for these production details. See Remes, Absence in Cinema, 141; and Remes, “Animated Holes,” 70.
Quoted in Remes, Absence in Cinema, 113.
Prosser, “Skin Memories,” 52. See also Prosser, Second Skins.
See, e.g., Amin et al., “Queer Form”; Doyle and Getsy, “Queer Formalisms”; and Luciano and Chen, “Queer Inhumanisms.”
Bois and Krauss, Formless, 21. This operation, they hope, will realign the “interpretive grid” so that modernist works can “no longer be read as they have before” (21).
I think that this is true, even as their project seeks to integrate the contaminating elements of kitsch and capital.
One might say that this reading is implicit in Skin Film’s text, in that the film’s separation of skin from material body makes explicit the vulnerability of formless flesh, once stripped of both form and legal protection.
As Saidiya Hartman writes: “The fungibility of the commodity, specifically its abstractness and immateriality,” has “enabled the black body or blackface mask to serve as the vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment” (Scenes of Subjection, 26). The detachment of lived forms of Blackness into object form allows privileged others to take up isolated forms like blackface, minstrelsy, and the appropriation of speech, manners, and dress as articles for playful self-expression. While under some circumstances play can produce social transformation, here it merely reinforces cultural codes of representation. In the past decade we have seen this quite literally in the mercenary appropriation of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous identities. We might think here of Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug and the phenomenon of “Pretendians.” Hartman has written about fungibility across her oeuvre. See, e.g., Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Hartman, “Dead Book Revisited”; and Hartman, “Intimate History, Radical Narrative.”
Unfortunately, most writers on experimental film tend to think about race only when considering work by experimental Black filmmakers like Ina Archer, Ephraim Asili, Robert Banks, Nuotama Frances Bodomo, A. Sayeeda Clarke, Kevin Everson, Ja’Tovia Gary, Christopher Harris, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, and Cauleen Smith. See also the resurgence of interest in the more narrative experimental work by filmmakers associated with the LA Rebellion, such as Charles Burnett, Larry Clark, Julie Dash, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Teshome Gabriel, Haile Gerima, Allie Larkin, and Billy Woodberry, as well as that of film and video makers like Tony Cokes, Cheryl Dunye, William Greaves, Isaac Julian, Edward Owens, and dawn suggs.
See, e.g., Bradley, Anteaesthetics; Lloyd, Under Representation; Mercer, Travel and See; and Thompson, Shine.
Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams, 21. Brinkema continues: “Reading without guarantee always risks defaulting on the contracts that purport to stabilize and restrain signification . . . generating surprise in the unfolding act of reading itself—all of that which is derived from its quality of being an uncertain investment, resisting economies that promise high yields and predictable returns” (21).
For Bradley, Blackness “poses a distinctive aesthetic problematic—a problem for and prerequisite of the aesthetic which sustains the semblance of an ordered world” (Anteaesthetics, 10). See also Chandler, X—The Problem of the Negro; Lloyd, Under Representation; Moten, “The Case of Blackness”; Thompson, Shine; Warren, “The Catastrophe”; Weheliye, Habeas Viscus.
Ferreira da Silva in Bradley and Ferreira da Silva, “Four Theses on Aesthetics.”
Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” 28; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. Muñoz sees impersonality as dependent on a gay white male sameness that withdraws from race, gender, and class difference. At the same time, Muñoz sees the queer coming together of skins not as “anti-relational,” as does Bersani, but as a form of collectivity, or kinship, that is performed with an eye toward a queer utopian future.
